Overdrive

Other interesting cars we've been driving

Eighties revival 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser Mark Dixon

THE PICK-UP truck in front of us is a proper working vehicle. Ifor Williams top, mud tyres, Welsh hill farmer at the wheel. We’re on an old drover’s road, a rocky track in Carmarthenshire, Wales. The Romans used it first, and if you know where to look you can still see the earthworks from a couple of their marching camps.

This is the steepest part of the route, where strata of bedrock have been pushed almost vertically to the surface, creating miniature mountain ranges with gravelly valleys. The pick-up has four-wheel drive but it struggles to find traction as a front wheel paws the air, until the driver’s sheer determination powers it forward.

We’re in a new Toyota Land Cruiser on road tyres, but this shouldn’t be a problem. Select Low Ratio, engage centre diff lock and rear diff lock. And then – the pièce de résistance – press another button that decouples the front anti-roll bar to allow greater suspension articulation. Steel coil springs, you see, rather than puncture-prone airbags.

That’s the thing about the new Land Cruiser: packed with tech but at heart an old-school 4x4 on a separate chassis with a big diesel engine. There are definite visual similarities with the classic 70-series of the 1980s, including – on the First Edition model – round headlights. That’s now sold out in the UK, and so we’re in the slit-headlight Invincible version. Still looks very cool, especially in this Sand paint that’s indelibly associated with old Land Cruisers.

Let’s tranquilise the elephant in the room first. That 2.8-litre diesel engine is ‘only’ a 200bhp turbo four-pot; the competition all offer straight-sixes with 250-300bhp. For a vehicle weighing 2.5 tonnes and with a 3.5-tonne towing capacity, 200bhp is not a lot.